Bug Watch: January 1, 2003

In my commentary in last
month's column, I mentioned that Autodesk provides a BigFix
service that informs users of the availability of updates. That
is no longer true. On November 30 2002, Autodesk discontinued its
BigFix service. So a level of service I described last month as
"not good enough" has slipped lower still.

Dimstyle dialog distress
(2000 to 2002 SP1)

In the Text tab of the Dimstyle (nee Ddim) dialog box, a handy little
[. . .] button takes you to the text style dialog box. If you choose
a TrueType font in there, be very careful. If you move the top dialog
box before applying the changes, or if you switch to another program
and back to AutoCAD again, AutoCAD crashes, complaining of an exception
in ACDIM.ARX, with this message:

AutoCAD 2000 introduced a feature that lets you have multiple paper
spaces, known as layouts, in a single drawing file. For example,
you can have a drawing of a long pipeline in model space, then a
large number of layouts, each containing a title block and a viewport
that shows a short section of the pipeline. Thus, a single drawing
file can encapsulate a whole series of what will end up as plotted
drawings. You can tell AutoCAD's Plot command to plot all layouts,
and it will do so.

So where's the bug? A trip to the plotter's output bin reveals the
problem. The plots don't come out in any kind of logical order.
The larger the number of layouts, the worse it gets. If you produce
multiple copies of a large series of plots, somebody has to sort
the mess out-a tedious and error-prone job.

The exact order in which AutoCAD plots the layouts depends on a
number of factors. The first thing to understand is that layouts
are not plotted in the order in which the layout tabs are arranged.
That's a shame, because you can rearrange the order of layouts by
right-clicking on a layout tab. Don't bother trying that as a workaround,
because tab order is ignored when plotting.

Next, although AutoCAD defaults to layout names such as Layout1,
Layout2, Layout10, etc., the layouts are not plotted in number order.
They are plotted mostly in alphabetical order, so you'd expect Layout10
to come after Layout1 but before Layout2. You can work around this
part of the problem by giving layouts names such as Layout001, Layout002,
etc. or LayoutA, LayoutB, etc.

Earlier, I said that layouts are plotted mostly in alphabetical
order. Why "mostly"? Because when you have less than 9
layouts, the first layout always plots last. For example, layouts
named Layout1 through Layout5 are plotted in the order 2 3 4 5 1.

With more than 9 layouts, the order is even more complicated, because
the layout in the middle is plotted first, and the first layout
is plotted in the middle. With an even number of layouts, obviously
there is no middle layout. In that case, AutoCAD grabs the layout
just after the middle and swaps that with the first layout. For
example, layouts named Layout1 through Layout12 plot in the order
4 10 11 12 2 3 1 5 6 7 8 9. That's not the sort of thing you want
to deal with when you have multiple copies of drawing sets to bundle
up and a tight deadline to meet.

Workaround: Use this LISP/DCL
routine (5KB ZIP file) to add a Plotall command to AutoCAD.
This routine presents a dialog box and plots all layouts in the
order you specify. There is also a -Plotall command (note the leading
hyphen), which is a command-line version for use in menus and scripts.

About the Author: Steve Johnson

Autodesk Technical Evangelist Lynn Allen guides you through a different AutoCAD feature in every edition of her popular "Circles and Lines" tutorial series. For even more AutoCAD how-to, check out Lynn's quick tips in the Cadalyst Video Gallery. Subscribe to Cadalyst's free Tips & Tools Weekly e-newsletter and we'll notify you every time a new video tip is published. All exclusively from Cadalyst!Follow Lynn on Twitter